“I just recognize that, in general, it’s required for stamina.” For her, there’s longevity to consider, and weight loss-“but not in the way that is toxic,” she points out. Lately, that unruliness is matched by Gay’s commitment to fitness tedium. In the previous year’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay offered up her own answer in unsparing, incisive detail.
“What does it mean to live in an unruly body?” asked Gay in a prompt to writers for her 2018 pop-up magazine with Medium. It qualifies as #fitspo, but Gay’s version refuses to conform to influencer banalities. “34:33 cardio,” a recent caption read, her face glistening and joyless beneath a hot-pink head wrap. It’s “all horrible,” the writer explains by phone, her tone as blank as her post-workout selfies on Instagram Stories. Roxane Gay has nothing good to say about her exercise bike.